SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  11/12/05; 8:56:09 PM Msg#:  4608 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  4607/4609 Reads:  3597

If you've looked at SongTrellis pages recently in Our Composers, The Changes or The Rhythms you may have noticed that many of them refer to a SongTrellis Excerpt Service. What is that?

The Excerpt Service allows users of the site to make smaller sub-selections within musical materials already available on SongTrellis and have an edit performed which creates a MIDI sequence and printable score from that small section of a score and have it delivered to you via a web page.

Why is it valuable to do that?

Well, being able to clip out part of a score allows you to learn a piece in small chunks. If you are trying to improvise on a set of chord changes, you can practice on a small, easily memorable part of the entire score and master that section before you move on to another section of the piece.

If you are trying to learn to play or remember a complicated melody, you can pull out a clip of each phrase of a piece, and focus your practice efforts on the parts that you find hard to master.

If you are composing a new musical composition, you can copy an attractive sounding sequence of chords from another piece and paste it collage-like into the sequence for your new piece.

If you are trying to write an article online that describes something that is happening in a musical composition, you can quote the composition via a MIDI clip or printable score and link to the quote in your article.

If you want to ask an expert about some feature of a composition, you can use the service to make a quote and point to exactly the part of the piece that your question refers to.

If you are preparing a web page that lists many different musical compositions, you might want to provide a sample of the first few bars of the piece, without making it necessary for the entire score to be shipped to the user so they can sample it.

You can transform an excerpt in useful ways using the service.

The tempo of a tune, chord sequence or rhythm might be too fast or too slow for your purposes. Once your excerpt has been played once, the excerpt server displays the current tempo of the piece and allows you to change that on the next playback.

It could be that you play a transposing instrument. The musical examples posted on SongTrellis are only in concert key. If you try to play the scores posted there, you'll hear the music you're playing in the wrong key when you try to play along with a MIDI sequence. Using the service you can display and print the proper transposed version for your instrument which will let you match the pitches that are to played in the melody of your excerpt.

It could be that you would like to hear the music in a different key from what it was originally composed in. Using the excerpt service, you can create a MIDI version that is transposed up or down from the published version.

How does it work?

If you visit a SongTrellis tune or rhythm page and the service is able to prepare excerpts for you, that page will include a link to the SongTrellis Excerpt Service. If you followed an Excerpt Service link from my tune Year's End, you'd visit a page that's titled "Play Excerpt of Year's End". This would include type-in fields that specify the first bar and last bar of your excerpt, along with Play, Loop and Stop buttons. When you press the Play button, a MIDI file containing your selection will be created along with a matching musical score, and the MIDI file will play as a background sound as the score is displayed for you. If you press "Loop", the excerpt you request will play repeatedly until you press the "Stop" button

To transform your excerpt by changing its tempo, transpsosing it or preparing scores for transposing instruments, you can use the edit field entitled temp, or change the selected item in the popup controls entitled "Display:" and "Transpose original score".

Here are some complete musical scores from Our Composers that you can request excerpts for:

Toddler's Song
Hiding From Headlights
Aerobatic

Here are some chord change scores from The Changes that can be excerpted:

502 Blues
Keep Hold Of Yourself
Introspection

Here are some excerptable rhythm sequences from The Rhythms:

Aconcon
Bomba

Please join our community at SongTrellis. Our contributors welcome your comments, suggestions and requests. As soon as you join the site (or login if you are a member) a response form will appear here.